“How to Listen,” the six-month weekly series that dived into so-called classical music, was not my idea. The suggestion that I rely on a lifetime of listening to guide readers who may be interested in expanding musical horizons through my selection of pieces seemed a reasonable enterprise, although I had no idea how I would go about it.
I did, at first, resist titling it “How to Listen.” In the back of my mind was what Virgil Thomson liked to call the music appreciation racket. What I hadn’t counted on, however, was that the series would not be me telling you how to listen, but me finding out how to listen myself as I worked through 25 pieces that I figured I knew pretty well.
FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
As a concert pianist, the stage is my life. But the pandemic taught me to love the livestream [Los Angeles Times]
On Nov. 9, 1966, Alex Trebek famously interviewed a shy Canadian pianist by the name of Glenn Gould, who had boldly proclaimed the death of the live concert and retired into the confines of a recording studio. The Beatles had performed their last official concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco just a couple of months earlier and settled at Abbey Road Studios (then called EMI Studios) to produce some of their most beloved work. Nothing could have been more shocking at a time when Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones were soaring to new heights with worldwide concert tours and Joel Grey was in previews playing the Emcee in “Cabaret.”
On Nov. 9, 1966, Alex Trebek famously interviewed a shy Canadian pianist by the name of Glenn Gould, who had boldly proclaimed the death of the live concert and retired into the confines of a recording studio. The Beatles had performed their last official concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco just a couple of months earlier and settled at Abbey Road Studios (then called EMI Studios) to produce some of their most beloved work. Nothing could have been more shocking at a time when Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones were soaring to new heights with worldwide concert tours and Joel Grey was in previews playing the Emcee in “Cabaret.”
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Poetry Daily,
and elsewhere. Matty is a Vice Presidential Fellow at the University of Utah where he is pursuing a PhD in English. He currently serves as the Managing Editor of
Quarterly West and the Wasatch Writers in the Schools Coordinator.
INTRODUCTION
Write patiently and read generously. The sustainable poet quickly learns patience, whether that be in the writing process and the arc of an individual poem or the hellscape that is the submissions process. As a young writer, I allowed my desire for affirmation or belonging to lead me to submit work that I now (and perhaps then) understand was not ready. Most of that work was mercifully rejected, but some of those poems found homes, and now I have some not-entirely-horrific-but-fairly-sloppy ditties living out there in the dark expanse of the digital ether. Perhaps that’s one of the many reasons I’ve embraced a practice of reading generously. To read generously is not to automatically support a writer or their work or to